Letters to America

by Tom Blair

  After a morning sweep over Ravenna, my flight had just shut down on the ramp. No guns fired, no bombs dropped. Nothing to report. Then I saw people walking from the administrative huts to the edge of the operational runway. Roland was circling with two greens; there should have been one more, confirming all three landing gear were down and locked.

  Twice Roland flew by on a slow pass. All seemed okay to those on the ground. He could have retracted his landing gear and settled on the runway. No real chance of danger, only a pranged aircraft. But not today; he wasn’t going to dent a P-39 on his last sortie, he was going to land with the gear down; likely nothing more than a burnt-out bulb.

  As Roland curved from base to final, most of the curious started back to their duties, the landing heralded no drama. Gently Roland’s P-39 touched earth on the main gear, and just as the nose rotated down, the right wing dropped to the hard-packed runway as its main gear folded. In an instant the dragging wing arched Roland’s aircraft off the runway. Still no drama—except this day crews were working to add a second taxiway.

  A bulldozer and a grader, there they sat. Roland’s plane swung to the bulldozer, as if drawn by some great magnet. Then came a noise like thunder, a cloud of dust, a cloud quickly vanished, chased by the rising flames. A dozen or more of us sprinted across the runway.

  At twenty yards the air was a furnace. Rippling in the heat, the view of the P-39’s nose crumpled against the steel dinosaur earth mover. The Allison engine, the 2,000-pound steel mass behind the cockpit, torn from its mounts and into the cockpit. Our fire truck, merely a jeep with extinguishers, roared past me. Two firemen drew near the blaze, then within a half minute raced back, their clothes smoking, one with molten aluminum burning through his shoes while he rolled in agony.

  Then the scream. A scream as never heard before. A scream over the crack of explosions and the pops of ammunition cooking off. In the inferno an arm waving from the cockpit. There we stood, as the flames shot to the sky and the smoke burnt our eyes; there we stood as helpless as if the burning scene were a movie that we wished to have a different plot.

  In time the fuel was burned; all that could burn was burned. Only the steel skeleton of the P-39 remained, the engine, a drive shaft, the landing struts. But there was more: a stench of burnt rubber and flesh. I drew closer as the heat retreated. I strained to see Roland, to morbidly confirm that he was there, not sitting in the mess tent laughing at us. Metal parachute buckles marked the mass—a mass of black, a black shell cracked by intestines, and organs boiling and exploding through the charred shell.

  I collapsed on my knees and heaved violently.

  Roland’s death occasioned no pause. Weeks more of flight ops followed. But there was a toll; a toll paid most every day. The empty bed—a bed where another of my squadron mates had slept the night before.

  It wasn’t the death of a human that took its toll, it was the death of a person, a young man who had laughed with me at dinner messes, who spoke of his mother, his sister, his dreams. Each of these deaths chipped away part of my hope, my humanity, and worst, my sanity.

  Not so much from a sharp turn taken following thought, but more as a steady drift away, Daryl and I distanced ourselves from our fellow pilots—easily done because of the relentless attrition. By not making friends with replacement pilots, soon there were few in the squadron we considered comrades. We knew their names, and in time we knew how well they could fly and perform their missions, but we took care not to learn their favorite drink, nor their skills at singing a ditty or dancing a jig. We kept them wrapped in the opaque skin of a human, not permitting the personality of someone intriguingly unique to shine through.

  But it was not only the death of others that warped my emotions, it was the prospect of my death, a prospect shackled to my psyche that in time I came to know was a prophecy. After a three-hour sweep north of Milan and back I was on a wide circuit to land, two others from the flight were down, I on an extended downwind with Daryl in trail. My P-39 shook as never before, an explosion and jolt as if rammed by an anvil, the engine spun its last. Smoke and heat in the cockpit, but enough vision to see my prop stop, no longer pulling, but dragging in the airstream. Quickly pushed the nose down to keep up speed. Too low to parachute, too low to glide to an open field, only an expanse of trees in front of me. Tightened my shoulder harness and dropped my external tank. No more than a few brief seconds before I mushed into tree-tops. But the reciprocal of my bad luck engine played its hand. Trees were not stately hardwoods, rather thin brittle pines that folded compliantly as my wing exchanged air for vegetation to offset gravity. Only in the final instant did the prop plow into hard earth, rotating my aircraft into a somersault. Hanging upside-down from my shoulder harness the sudden silence was only of brief import, the rising flames from the engine behind the cockpit with fifty gallons of avgas in the fuselage tank better marked the moment. Straps released, I fell to the cockpit roof, kicked out a side window, and after a quick sprint slumped under a pine to witness the cremation. Exploding unspent ammunition hastened my scramble to a more distant venue.

  Before Italy my mental health was rock solid: traditional passions and flawless logic. But with the grating of battle—the swings between that of pursuer and pursued, the transient and fractured fellowship with squadron mates—my feelings became conflicted. At one apex of my emotional pendulum I wanted to punch anyone who uttered a word of perceived criticism; at the opposite apex I couldn’t speak for the fear of sobbing for a reason unknown. Twice I lashed out at Daryl for an imagined slight.

  A few days after my second eruption, in the calm of our tent as dusk beckoned night, Daryl broke the virginity of his prized bottle of Barolo Fratelli Minuto. He then offended the pedigreed grape by forcing its intimacy with our army-issued metal cups. After a few words of commentary on the complexity and balance of the sloshing liquid, Daryl told me I wasn’t myself. He thought that perhaps I had stolen a concussion when I flipped the P-39 in the woods, told me I needed to see the Doc.

  Looking away from Daryl I sat my cup down and left, my thoughts tangled. Waiting until late, I only returned when I was certain that Daryl was asleep. A few days later I lost it, blew my temper at a sergeant who had been sweating all night to get my tired aircraft ready. I chewed him out in front of his men, chewed him out for not having my parachute lying on the wing when I walked to the aircraft. The next morning my name wasn’t chalked on the squadron flight board; I was told that I was on sick call, I needed to see the Doc. Dewey, the colonel’s adjutant, had seen my histrionics at the flight line and ordered my stand-down.

  The Doc checked me over, exploring most orifices. After depositing himself on what appeared to be a Louis XVI chair, likely liberated from a nearby villa, he began the questions: Did I sleep, did I worry, did I have mood swings. I answered; I lied.

  To make himself comfortable, perhaps to entice me to candor, the Doc propped his feet up on his desk and lit a pipe as a flight of P-39s tore over, the tent flaps rippling in their wake. Asked me if I would rather have one week’s leave or stay on flying status. I told him flying. The Doc took a puff, put his pipe down and looked at me silently for a few moments, then a smile. Told me I needed a week off to untorque my brain; said that if I’d told him I wanted a week furlough he would have known I was okay, but anyone not wanting a furlough needed a furlough.

  In a corner of the Doc’s tent, on shelves made from a K-ration crate, lined up like miniature soldiers, stood a regiment of jars and bottles. From one of the larger jars the Doc carefully counted out fourteen greenish-blue pills. As if somehow I had won a grand prize, he explained that he was sending me to Naples for a week’s R&R. Told me that each night before hitting the rack I should take two pills and wash them down with a stiff drink. He promised me that if I did I would sleep like the dead. I wanted to scream in his face; wanted to scream that I couldn’t sleep because of death, the fear of death.

  As I stuffed my duffel bag for Naples Daryl provided a monologue send-off. Said
he couldn’t wait to have our tent to himself, couldn’t wait to be the lead, let someone be his wingman, let them try to follow a corkscrewing ace wannabe. While giving me more than a firm handshake, Daryl challenged me, told me that if I didn’t have at least two social diseases when I returned I wasn’t a real fighter pilot.

  For the first few days of my medical-directed furlough I wished to be back at Montecorvino. By the end of the week I didn’t want to return. I found myself a room in what had been a first-class apartment, two blocks from the south side of the ruins of Santa Chiara. Only had to share a toilet with three other rooms—all three occupied by British officers who understood the protocols of flushing, a procedure not fully practiced by our Italian hosts. I bought a Kodak from a staff sergeant in dire need of a poker stake; figured I would patch together a photographic record of sights for Father and Mother. We couldn’t send photographs home, but I could take them with me when I returned.

  Naples’ public and royal buildings not pummeled by our Bomber Command had been well picked over by retreating Germans. Wall hooks gave testimony to spots where paintings had hung. Pedestals, supporting nothing, marked the previous residences of marble and bronze sculptures. But still it was there, the grandeur of the city of Bernini, Caravaggio, and Rosa. One evening I savored La Bohème. Mimi and Rodolfo so enraptured the audience that little note was made of the battle scars of Teatro di San Carlo. Another warm evening I sat in an outdoor café on the edge of Piazza del Plebiscito and listened to a choir practice, voices flowing through the collapsed church front, while I sipped a bottle of anonymous red to a slow death; this done as young couples strolled by in light clothes and lighter conversation. My problem wasn’t sleeping, it was waking.

  Much of Naples’ ravaged population was desperate for shelter and food. For those with homes not destroyed, food was available, for a price—a high price. In front of many finer residences stood makeshift shops, homeowners selling their valuables for monies to buy food on the black market. This is how I came to acquire my peace offering to Daryl. From a lady looking fifty, but more likely forty, wearing a flowing peach chiffon dress, a remnant of a time and a dignity long gone, I was pleased to overpay for two long-stem crystal wine glasses. As I handed her the consideration she looked away; this day she was selling something more dear than her crystal.

  One stain on my Naples sabbatical. On the last day of my therapeutic holiday I was strolling along the curve of Naples Bay, Mt. Vesuvio with its fluffy white bonnet as a backdrop, pondering the weighty problem of the day: which café should host me for lunch, and if I ordered fish would a Fiano di Avellino best complement the aquatic? Then the attempted arrest. Two MPs, Military Police, one a corporal and one a sergeant, stopped me with a harsh call. I was being arrested for impersonating an officer. They assumed that in the army there were no black officers; ergo, I was an impersonator.

  For the first time as an adult I used spoken anger not to vent, but to sway. In a deep voice, deeper than usual and certainly louder, I told, I threatened, the MPs that they had fifteen seconds to come to attention and salute me and when they did I would return their salute, to be followed by them quickly spinning 180 degrees and leaving. Otherwise, I barked, they would be the ones behind bars.

  Both stood silent. Quick glances passed between them. Hesitantly the corporal clicked his heels together; then, as if dragged by the weight of the corporal’s action, the sergeant drew to attention and saluted. I returned his salute sharply. They turned and were soon gone, no doubt doubting what they had just done.

  Someone new, a new face, was poised on Daryl’s cot when I returned; prone, leaning on one elbow, reading a copy of Life magazine with Mary Martin on the cover. When I asked for Daryl, he said he didn’t know Daryl, he was just told to bunk in this tent.

  Daryl was dead. No details, only that he and his wingman had been seen diving on an FW-190; then all three into a cloud bank. Later two columns of smoke rose from a forest. Most thought Daryl’s wingman had tangled with him as they cut blindly through the haze of white. Of no importance how, no importance to me. But the outcome: I paid the price. The price for not diversifying my emotional risk. For months Daryl and I had isolated ourselves; our lives were not entwined with others, lest they be killed and we feel remorse. But with Daryl’s death I had no human handhold to steady my sanity. I had lost my only anchor. I was adrift, adrift with anger, an anger that squeezed out all passion save hate.

  But hate only defined half of me; the other half was ambivalence. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about me or anyone other than Krauts. Them I wanted to kill, and I did. I abandoned self-preservation. I twisted and pulled my P-39 beyond what should have been its limits, whatever was necessary for the kill. My wingmen couldn’t follow, they couldn’t protect my six o’clock, and I didn’t care, I was pursuing, pursuing to kill. I felt no concern other than how to best kill a Kraut. Then came the train.

  As we had done a score of times before, my squadron escorted a large force of B-17s halfway to their target, in time relieved by a gaggle of P-51s; they had the range to go all the way with the bombers. Heading back to base on the lookout for targets of opportunity, anything moving; I diverted twenty degrees to the south to follow train tracks glinting in the sun; rails that weren’t rust-covered, they were well traveled. Just past a small village, heading south toward the front, I spotted a train with no windows in the cars, just flat sides, likely a supply train.

  Before I would have flown away, dropped to treetop level, and circled back for my attack. By staying low there wouldn’t be time for Kraut gunners to track me. But this day I peeled straight toward them. A half-mile out, the side of the front car dropped and two antiaircraft guns opened fire. Glowing balls of tracers arced over my aircraft. I pushed in the left rudder to track the front car, opened up with the guns, then stabilized to let the train pull itself through my line of fire.

  Just before passing low over the last few cars an eruption of force, a car blew up, flame, smoke, and debris higher than my aircraft. In an instant in and out of the fireball … but long enough to be battered by rocketing debris. Once at altitude a quick scan of the engine instruments; all the pointers were caressing the appropriate numbers. No damage apparent.

  Back at base I taxied to my revetment. With the ground crew on the wing after shutdown, I unbuckled and headed to the operations tent for a debrief. A curt call from my crew chief, I turned. Likely he wanted to show me some damage, some ripped aluminum from shells and flying bits of train and cargo. Often my ground crew pointed out damage so I could feel guilty that by risking death I had damaged their aircraft, an aircraft they would work on long into the night to make right. But not this day. This day they were standing at the leading edge of the starboard wing staring.

  It was there, just outside of the gun ports, folded back around the curve of the airfoil, perhaps six or eight inches long, half as wide. It looked like a piece of tan rubber, plastered and sealed against the leading edge by the force of 300-mile-an-hour flow of air. But this wasn’t some ordinary scrap of rubber. This rubber had hair growing from it, its edges a dark, caked red. This was of God’s making, human skin. A corporal wanted to peel it away, eradicate any testimony to our purpose, killing people. For me, I felt no such concern; I saw a trophy, a trophy to be displayed. I ordered it not to be touched. For more than a full week the skin stayed, slowly dark brown, then black. As I taxied in from each mission the ground crews would steal a glance, hoping it was gone, pleased it was not.

  It was the skin, or stories about the skin, that brought about my transfer. Colonel Davis’s adjutant, Dewey, called me in to meet with him and the Doc. After a brief exchange of artificials, the Doc asked why the skin, why did I keep it plastered to the edge of my wing. I told him that airmen wear medals reflecting the death and destruction they had wreaked upon the Germans; why not let my P-39 wear its medal? A long silence. Then the adjutant asked if I had a Kraut head in my duffel bag. I frowned, puzzled. He asked if I had seen Spencer Tracy in
Northwest Passage; I told him I hadn’t seen the movie. He said too bad, then more silence.

  The Doc and Dewey exchanged glances, and the Doc gave a slight nod. Dewey leaned toward me and spoke softly, told me I was being transferred. It was my call. Did I want to be shipped back to a training squadron, or did I want to take a temporary assignment with the Eighth, the Eighth Air Force, in England? When I didn’t reply, he told me to make a choice, or he would. The Eighth was all white; black squadrons were stationed in Italy. I asked by what circumstances a black Air Corps officer would be stationed in England. Dewey said he was being assigned to Doolittle’s staff, a non-flying job, and said I could transfer with him. I did.

  While not the Mark Hopkins, the American air base at Chester, a hundred miles or so south of London, was quite, as the British would say, posh. Not an extravagant posh, but unquestionably posh as contrasted with the layered dirt at Montecorvino. Not the least notable: hot water, all one could want.

  But it wasn’t the hot water, or the heated barracks and warm food that were the best, it was the train station. Just over a mile from the base was a farming village with a station whose tracks pointed toward, then intersected, magnificent London. Within two hours of returning the salute of the sentry at the base gatehouse, I was humbly hunched in the back pew of Saint Paul’s, giving thanks. After the soul, the body; a pint and some friendly cheeses at the Savoy, interrupted only by Big Ben calling the hour.